8 December 2006

The left handed Liberals

| johnboy
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Inside today’s Canberra Times was the astonishing news that all of the Liberal men in the Legislative Assembly are both sinister and gauche, which is to say they’re left handed.

Now I’ve got nothing against left-handed freaks. Adam Gilchrist seems all right.

But all five? One senses a conspiracy afoot. Maybe it’s not the soul-less red-heads that are trying to take over the world?

You can be sure when we send out our candidate questionnaire in 2008 we’ll be inquiring as to handedness to inform your voting decisions.

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CanberraGreen2:24 pm 08 Dec 06

Ok, is there some sort of consipracy.
The five Liberal MLAs are all lefties, the Liberal Candidate for Fraser is a lefty so if Senator Humphries is a lefy all male Liberal politicians will be lefties.

youshould_knowthis12:56 pm 08 Dec 06

How did they al put their differences aside long enough to be photographed together in the same place? Perhaps the Canberra Times has digitally altered the picture?

At last the five independents have found something in common ….

Ah right. I was going for the most generous estimate I could find which was 20% left handedness, but wikipedia tells me that (in the US, at least), it’s 12% for 20 year olds, down to around 5% at 50 year olds. For anyone too lazy to do the maths, taking Ralph’s value of 8%, the odds of 5 randomly selected people all being left handed are .0003%, or 3 in a million.

God, I love statistics 🙂

At last, a useful story from the Canberra Times!

Sorry, 8 per cent of the population is left handed – so should be 0.08^5.

Er…surely you mean 0.2^5? 0.8^5 would be the probability of them all being right handed.

So given how staggeringly unlikely it is that they all just happen to be lefties perhaps we should examine a more likely scenario?

Perhaps they’re all pod people? (a’la bodysnatchers) with the left-write thing mirrored when they got copied?

Seems a lot more likely to me…

Absent Diane10:30 am 08 Dec 06

so even if you vote for the right.. you still are voting for the left???

Actually that should be 0.8^5

Probability of that is 0.8^3

Ralph is also left handed. Proportion of left handed males where I work is also way out of proportion with the general population.

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